This is a painful and difficult thing for me to write, and yet it also represents something that is long overdue: It is time for me to say goodbye to the Pinstriped Bible.
I began the Pinstriped Bible back in the 1990s, at a time when b...
This is a painful and difficult thing for me to write, and yet it also represents something that is long overdue: It is time for me to say goodbye to the Pinstriped Bible.
I began the Pinstriped Bible back in the 1990s, at a time when baseball coverage on the Internet was scant and the number of team blogs were few. At the time, I had to convince the decision-makers at the few platforms that existed that there would be interest in a regular baseball feature, one that attempted to build community around common interest in a team, and that it was worth their while to pay me (or anyone) to write it. The focus wouldn't be on reporting, but conversation and analysis. I called what I was proposing a column, but it was really a blog -- the term just hadn't yet come into common usage.
Over the years that followed, the Pinstriped Bible had many homes, including the original Yankees.com, MLB.com, YES, and finally here. The feature opened many doors for me. I made many good friends and came to the attention of Baseball Prospectus. I joined BP in 2003 -- in company parlance I became an "author" -- and over time, my work there gradually became the focus of my professional life. The Pinstriped Bible remained important to me, but it no longer commanded my full attention. The same was true when I came here to SB Nation. My job had two distinct functions -- the Pinstriped Bible and duties around the network, which ultimately coalesced in the editorship of sbnation.com's baseball coverage.
Somehow, the latter always seemed to win out. This was in part due to the fact that in my old age I tend to work slowly and methodically. As such, splitting time between roles became difficult, but it is also true that it had been a long time since I considered the PB my most important or interesting job, and though it was never my intention to put it in second place, it just kept happening. When I came to SB Nation, I thought I could reverse the flow of energy away from the PB that had begun at Baseball Prospectus, but that was simply unrealistic. I had changed too much.
Keep in mind my well of fandom was never deep. I was brought up as a Yankees fan, to a certain extent, but baseball was not a huge part of my family or my identity. As a small child I got caught up in the excitement of the 1976-1981 Yankees, the Reggie-Billy teams, but mostly because it was something that was omnipresent in the culture, not because those around me were highly invested. The emergence of Don Mattingly as a star when I was 13 led me to a more mature, thorough interest, as well as to Bill James. Yet, I was never a diehard fan of the team in the same sense that many of my readers were. This was in part due to my upbringing, which taught me to be analytical and agnostic about most things, but also due to a quirk of my personality: The bigger the crowd I am in, the lonelier I get and the more alienated I feel. Essentially, as Groucho Marx said, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. I am not a joiner or a follower, and never will be. Blind allegiance to anything is not something to which I can relate.
I think it also mattered that during that part of my life when I was most susceptible to learning to be a fan in the bumper-sticker sense of the term that the Yankees were not always easy to root for: When I was very young, the team was winning World Series, but the dysfunctional romantic triangle that was Reggie, Billy, and George (or George, Billy, and everybody else) meant that those wins were tinged with a kind of stressful negativity that I could sense even then -- as a kid, you just want everyone to get along, especially mommy and daddy, but also your favorite team, its biggest star, its owner, and its manager. Subsequently, when I was rediscovering baseball in the Mattingly years, the team represented a paradox: they won more games than any other team in baseball, but without ever reaching the postseason, and on many levels they were run -- ther